Revisiting
the
Lessons
of Operation Allied Force

A Serbian S-125 / SA-3 Goa
battery killed
an F-117A Nighthawk early in the OAF air campaign. Complacency was
clearly the single biggest contributor to this unprecedented combat
loss. A second F-117A suffered damage from a near miss SA-3 shot.

This is an updated version
of a paper, which
was originally presented as Air Power and
the Strategy of withholding Military Force – The Air Campaign over
Kosovo,
at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Nanyang
Technological
University in Singapore on 28 January 2000.

The first key lesson the campaign produced, was that an opposing
ground force must be driven out from cover, to induce the concentration
of force required to facilitate efficient targeting and destruction by
firepower.

The second key lesson of the war was the effectiveness of the passive
air defence measures, especially mobility and decoys, on the air
campaign itself. The Russian military certainly took notice of
Operation Allied Force
and this is reflected in fundamental doctrinal and technological
changes in their approach to operating and designing air defence
systems.

There is much new equipment, primarily of Russian and Chinese origin,
but also from Belarus and the Ukraine, now available on the open market
as building blocks, for any country with enough money and the
motivation, to create a highly survivable Integrated Air Defence
System.

However, the biggest lesson learnt by Russian strategists was the need
to be able to ‘shoot and scoot’ like self-propelled artillery.

Operation Allied Force showed mobility was the key element to
survivability, as the fourth part of this paper shows.

The
Federal
Yugoslav
Integrated Air Defence System (IADS)
survived Operation Allied Force (OAF), the NATO air campaign used to
force the
removal of Serbian forces from Kosovo, which ran from 24th March
to 9th June, 1999, and at
its height involved over 1,000 aircraft. Survival
of the IADS was achieved by employing three different methods to
negate NATO’s
air power.The decision not to use
ground forces certainly made Serb defensive measures much easier.By deliberately not employing all their
defence assets at once, known as the strategy of withholding military
force, the
constant moving about of its mobile surface-to-air missile to ensure
they could
not be targeted, and the widespread
use of deception measures.

The
Successful Serbian Strategy of Withholding
Military Force

The
strategy of withholding
military force is different to a holding action, as it is an asymmetric
strategy for a weaker force to withstand attacks upon its centre of
gravity,
was developed by the Communist Chinese to nullify the overwhelming air
supremacy that the United States and its allies held in Korea. By
withholding
forces from action, in the event of attacks by superior forces, it can
absorb more punishment than otherwise, which Mao
referred to as ‘the
breaking of pots and pans’.

The strategy is particularly
important in the context of air power, as by hiding resources and
deliberately
withholding them from action, the forces trying to locate them cannot
destroy
them.An air campaign can
then become one of virtual attrition to the detriment of the aggressor,
due to the
wearing out
of men and machines, for very little gain.Morale
and
public
opinion aspects also come into play
when there appears to be little or no results for the resources
expended.

A defending ground force needs to
be forced to
expose itself, thus allowing it to be attacked by air power.One option is to stage an attack
that is designed to compel a defending force to react.An
example
could
be the insertion of forces by
air to embarrass the leadership into defending more areas.To enable air power to hunt
down and then destroy targets requires robust Intelligence,
Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) systems and Precision Guided
Munitions (PGM).Terrain masking and
deception measures by small forces in complex terrain, such as hilly
and/or
jungle terrain, as occurred in Kosovo and in the various conflicts in
Southeast Asia,
often negate the use of most ISR systems, presenting difficulties in
locating and positively
identifying targets.The locating, tracking and
targeting of difficult to find targets often
require quantities and technological capabilities of equipment beyond a
country’s material resources.

The
aim of the OAF campaign was to force Serbian forces to stop attacks
upon ethnic
Albanians and leave Kosovo through the coercive application of air
power alone.Air power was to be used,
exclusively, to reduce casualties on the
NATO side, which made life for the Serbian forces in Kosovo easier as
there were
no ground troops to worry about.By
employing the strategy of withholding military force the Serbs avoided
having
their air defence and field units being destroyed in the first days of
the air
campaign.They had absorbed the
lessons of Operation Desert Storm, and preserved their assets for the
long haul, which
was a successful strategy as Serb forces were still firing
Surface-to-Air Missiles (SAM) on the last day of Operation Allied Force.[1]Employing passive systems such as
electro-optical tracking equipment further enhanced the survivability
of IADS components, by not
creating an emission signature that NATO defence suppression aircraft
could lock on to. [2]

Problems
and
Issues
Surrounding the
Use of PGMs

Bad
weather and the rigid insistence on avoiding collateral damage and
casualties
to the
attack force dogged NATO planners.This
led to an over-reliance on Precision Guided Munitions (PGMs).In the
first three weeks of ‘Allied Force’ there were only seven days of
‘favourable
weather’ for air operations and ten days on which 50 percent of the
strikes had
to be cancelled due to the fear of collateral damage.[3]Ninety
percent of the
ordnance dropped were PGMs which also had
their own problems.Global Positioning System
(GPS) aided munitions, the only affordable all-weather munitions, can
be inaccurate due to
the
cumulative effect of numerous GPS
errors, as well as small inaccuracies in the targeting aircraft,
maps
and the
munition itself.This is
called the ‘sensor-to-shooter error budget’ in United States parlance.[4]Further,
the amount of
cloud over Kosovo caused many laser-guided bombs (LGBs) to ‘lose lock’
and ‘go
rogue’ often landing kilometres away from
their intended
target.[5]

The
reliance on GPS guided bombs caused a shortage that became so acute in
late
April that the GPS guided Joint Direct
Attack Munitions (JDAM) were
available
for only the B-2A Spirit bomber.[6]By late
April the ratio of
PGMs to unguided munitions used had dropped to 69 percent.[7]Many of
the targets struck
by PGMs in Kosovo were not judged to be
worth the
then $US12,000 cost of the Paveway
II
LGB kits, and could have
been
hit safely
by unguided ordnance.[8]The fire control avionics fitted to most NATO
aircraft enabled
very accurate bombing using ‘dumb’ bombs, albeit with a necessary
reduction in bombing altitude.

Serbian
ground forces were hard to locate due to their small unit size and
movement, generally
being
company sized units of between 80 to 150 personnel, and around six
armoured
vehicles, operating autonomously or semi-autonomously of each other.Using the
woods and mountains, and by not being a large
target or moving in a set direction, did not allow an
intelligence picture to be easily built up, and thus made these forces
difficult to locate from the air.[9]

NATO's insistence upon avoiding
collateral
damage at all costs by using precision guided munitions, and the
Serbian operational doctrine of hiding their forces, impacted the
outcome. The resulting effect of these two strategies was ‘virtual
attrition’, through the cost of the
munitions
expended and the accrued wear and tear on the aircraft employed.

The
air campaign over Kosovo severely affected the readiness rates of
the
United States Air Force’s Air Combat Command during that period.Units in the United States were the most badly
affected, as they were were stripped of their personnel and spare parts
to support ACC (Air Combat Command) and AMC (Air Mobility Command)
units involved in Operation Allied Force.The
Commander of the USAF’s Air Combat Command,
General Richard E Hawley, outlined this in a speech to reporters on 29
April,
1999.[10]Further,
many aircraft will have to be replaced
earlier than previously planned, as their planned fatigue life was
prematurely expended. PGM
inventories
needed to
be re-stocked, the warstock of the AGM-86C Conventional Air-Launched
Cruise
Missile
dropping to 100 or fewer rounds.[11]Of
the more than 25,000 bombs and
missiles expended, nearly 8,500 were PGMs, with the replacement cost
estimated
at $US1.3 billion.[12]
Thus the
USAF suffered from virtual attrition of its air force without
having scored
a large number of kills in theatre.Even if the
United States' best estimates of Serbian casualties
are used,
the Serbians left Kosovo with a large part of their armoured forces
intact.

Serbia operated a wide range of
former Soviet and indigenous point
defence weapons, which presented genuine risks to NATO aircraft
loitering at low altitudes. This forced bombing from higher altitudes,
which drove up the demand for PGM warstocks, and imposed severe weather
restrictions.

The Yugoslav Army operated a small number
of Soviet supplied 9K35 Strela 10 / SA-13
Gopher heatseeking SAM systems, carried on an indigenous chassis rather
than the Soviet supplied MT-LB chassis. The indigenous S-10MJ Sava
variant is carried on a fully amphibious chassis.

The Soviets
supplied no less than 113 9K33 / SA-9 Gaskin heatseeking missile
systems to Yugoslavia.

The Serbian forces in Kosovo were well
equipped with licence built legacy Soviet 9K32M / SA-7B Grail MANPADS,
and a small number of Kazakh supplied 9K310 Igla-1 / SA-16 MANPADS. The
depicted SA-7B rounds
were confiscated and destroyed. The total MANPADS inventory was cited
at ~850 rounds (US DoD).

The Serbians improvised two point defence weapons, based on the Soviet
supplied R-60 / AA-8 Aphid (below) and R-73 / AA-11 Archer (above) air
to air missiles. The RL-4M used a single Archer, the RL-2M a pair of
Aphids. Both designs used the Praga M53/59 SPAAG vehicle and neither appear to
have been used with any operational effect. According to JMR, the
designs were produced by the VTI (Vojno-Tehnicki Institut = Military
Technical Institute) and VTO (Vazduhoplovno-Opitni Centar = Air Force
Testing Centre).

In addition to the ubiquitous Soviet S-60
57 mm AAA gun, the Yugoslav Army operated fifty four Soviet supplied
ZSU-57-2 SPAAGs in 1999. In total Servia deployed around 1850 AAA
pieces (US DoD).

The licensed Czechoslovak Praga M53/59
twin 30 mm SPAAG was widely used during the Balkans conflict,
especially against soft-skinned ground targets. Based on the WW2 Flak
38 design, the ‘Praga’ is equipped with two PDLVK automatic guns and an
optical sighting system. Around 100 remained in service during OAF
(image via http://www.tanksforsale.co.uk/).

The indigenous BOV-3 SPAAG was widely used
by the Yugoslav Army. It is armed with three M55A4B1 20 mm automatic
guns.

Successful
Deception
Measures

Sun
Tzu wrote that all warfare is based on deception and Serbian deception
measures
were very successful.Decoys
were a real problem for strike aircraft, as loitering over an area at
low altitudes made
them
targets for MANPADS, infrared guided point defence SAMs such as the
SA-9 Gaskin and SA-13 Gopher, and SPAAGs such as the ZSU-23-4P,
BOV-3/30 series and the Praga M53/59.

At
least 16 decoys were hit that were thought to be real targets,
and a further nine decoys were also deliberately hit, so pilots would
not
loiter over them trying to discriminate between them and real targets.[13]They
also used up valuable airframe
hours, and the incurred attendant increased logistical costs.Air forces have not always had invested
sufficiently in
sensors to counter deception and camouflage techniques, which the Serbs
exploited
quite successfully.This was
noted quite early in the post ‘Allied Force’ after-action study.[14]

NATO
flew approximately 3,000 sorties over Kosovo, and just under
2,000 of these saw ordnance expended.[15]
These sorties were claimed at the time to have destroyed 93 tanks and
153
armoured
personnel carriers (APCs) out of the approximately 350 tanks and 440
APCs
believed to have been in Kosovo.[16]NATO
also
claimed
to have hit 339
military vehicles and 389 artillery pieces and mortars. [17]These
figures were widely off the
mark as General Clark, the Operation Allied Force commander, conceded
that not
all targets hit were destroyed, and that only 26 tanks could be
confirmed as
kills.[18]

Serbian IADS SAM Systems

Serbia operated a mix of
obsolescent and often time-expired Soviet era S-75 / SA-2 Guideline,
S-125 / SA-3 Goa and 2K12 / SA-6B Gainful area defence SAMs for the
protection of critical infrastructure and fielded military forces.
While these SAM systems did not inflict high losses on NATO aircraft,
with a reported 665 SAM rounds fired for two verified kills, the
inability of NATO to inflict decisive attrition upon the IADS resulted
in ongoing
high operational costs due to the need to keep EA-6B Prowler, RC-135V/W
Rivet Joint, Tornado ECR and F-16CJ Weasels airborne during any
significant operations over the territory of the rump FRY.

Serbia
is claimed to have modified a number of its legacy Soviet supplied S-75
Dvina / SA-2
Guideline SAM systems. Like the SA-3 Goa, the three SA-2 Guideline
batteries were
operated primarily from static sites and suffered losses to around 2/3
of the force (US DoD).

A total of 815 SAMs were fired at NATO
aircraft, of which 665 were radar guided SA-3 and SA-6 rounds. One
F-16C and one F-117A were killed by SAM shots, and one F-117A suffered
light damage from a near miss. Many SAM shots were unguided due to the
radar shutting down to avoid HARM shots.

NATO expended a total of 743 AGM-88 HARM
anti-radiation missile rounds, launched by EA-6B Prowlers, F-16CJ
Weasels and Tornado ECRs. The most notable aspect of this chart is that
more than 50% of HARMs were fired at mobile SA-6 batteries, which
suffered the lowest attrition of any Serbian radar guided SAM type.

US Air Force Orbat for
OAF. Notable is the high proportion of F-16CJ defence suppression
aircraft, around 40% of the total fast jet strike component. Even
accounting for provision of escort to aircraft flown by other NATO
nations and US heavy bombers, this is a very high proportion of the
strike force committed to protection against a collection of mostly
obsolescent Soviet era SAM systems.

Fixed
Air
Defences
Crippled But Mobile
Air Defences Survived

NATO
air planners were certainly concerned that not as many Serbian SAM
batteries were
destroyed, as they would have liked, with the then commander of the
United
States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) acknowledging the success of
Serbian SAM battery shoot-and-scoot
operational tactics.[19]Mobile systems suffered few
casualties but the fixed defences were smashed.Two of
Serbia’s three static S-75 Dvina / SA-2 Guideline SAM battalions and 70
percent of their static S-125 Neva /
SA-3 Goa SAM
sites were destroyed as compared with only three of their 22 mobile 9M9
Kvadrat / SA-6 Gainful SAM
systems.[20]

Serbia certainly left Kosovo, and suffered a tremendous amount of
damage to its infrastructure in Serbia,
yet in the
face of an air campaign that at the end numbered over 1,000 aircraft,
Serbian
combat power remained substantially intact.The
number of sorties generated by the NATO forces,
particularly the United States Air Force, left them short of spare
parts and
munitions, required increased maintenance, and a force reduced in
effective
size due
to the decreased fatigue life of many aircraft.This
virtual
attrition,
with little relative
destruction of the opposing forces, has shown that the Serbian military
strategy
was
successful, even if the Milosovic regime did not achieve its political
objectives.

Conclusion

The strategy of
withholding military force in Kosovo was a military success, even if it
did not prevent a political failure. Serbia retained its ground combat
strength, in
the face of overwhelming air power, and the Kosovo Liberation Army was
disarmed as part of the political settlement.

The first key lesson the campaign produced, was that an opposing ground force must be
driven out from cover, to induce the concentration of force required to
facilitate efficient targeting and destruction by firepower. The need
to keep NATO casualties to an absolute minimum was the reason for the
decision not to deploy ground forces, but as shown earlier in this
paper, this reduced the effectiveness of the air campaign. The
Serbian forces used their freedom of movement to maximum advantage.

The second key lesson of the war was the effectiveness of the passive
air defence measures, especially mobility and decoys, on the air
campaign itself. A NATO squadron commander, who reviewed the original
1999 version of this paper, said the paper should emphasise decoys more
as they were a huge problem during the campaign. This was explored in
the second section of the paper, but the discussion was limited by the
open source material available at that time.

The Russian military certainly took notice of Operation Allied Force
and this is reflected in fundamental doctrinal and technological
changes in their approach to operating and designing air defence
systems.

There is much new equipment, primarily of Russian and Chinese origin,
but also from Belarus and the Ukraine, now available on the open market
as building blocks, for any country with enough money and the
motivation, to create a highly survivable Integrated Air Defence System[27].

This equipment includes both passive and active, and soft and hard kill
measures as part of the air defence network, including transportable
GPS/GLONASS jammers, decoy radar emitters, active defensive
countermeasures for radars, ISR radar and airborne communications
jammers, and point defence missile systems designed to intercept
anti-radiation missiles such as the HARM and ALARM, and Precision
Guided Munitions such as the JDAM and JASSM.

However, the biggest lesson learnt by Russian strategists was the need
to be able to ‘shoot and scoot’ like self-propelled artillery. Stealth,
reduced sensor-to-shooter times and GPS guided munitions were already
making the older fixed air defence systems obsolete prior to Allied
Force and the Russians realised many of their systems were vulnerable.

Operation Allied Force showed mobility was the key element to
survivability, as the fourth part of the paper shows.

Mobility - The Most Important Lesson of
Operation Allied Force

Following OAF, Russian industry
launched a campaign to provide high mobility capabilities to all new
build, and many legacy SAM systems and radars.

High mobility is characteristic of new
build equipment from Russia and former Soviet republics. Above: the new
Vostok E radar can stow or deploy in 6 minutes. Below: NNIIRT's
new Nebo M VHF band radar on a high mobility BAZ-6909 series
chassis.

Further
Observations

The
British Ministry of Defence conducted a study of its operations in OAF
and
wrote that:

There is a
need for the UK and
its Allies and partners to improve capabilities in the following areas:

The
cost of these capabilities is considerable and some are yet to come
into
service.The RAF has received a variety
of new ISR systems, including the ASTOR Sentinel R.1
Airborne
Stand-Off Radar aircraft, entering service in December 2008, and the
first of the
new Airbus air-to-air refueller intended for IOC in
2011.[22]The USAF has introduced a
variety
of ISR systems, and sensors
including a number of Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for both the
ISR and precision strike missions. The US continues to operate a
very aged air-to-air refuelling fleet, with two attempts to
recapitalise the fleet having failed.

The
addition of GPS/INS to the Paveway II laser-guided bombs used by the
RAF, to provide ‘enhanced’
laser
guided bombs, gave
their strike aircraft an all-weather attack munition, but it was not
until February 2005 with the introduction
of the
Brimstone, that the RAF acquired a ‘Maverick type’ stand-off
all-weather PGM against small moving targets.[23]It was desperately needed, as
of the 1,005 bombs the RAF used in operation Allied Force, 254 were
laser-guided
and 531 were RBL755 cluster bombs.This paper noted the
need for a Maverick type weapon as the RAF was using the RBL755 against
point
targets with a high risk of collateral damage.[24]The
United States has introduced
various new PGMs such as the AGM-154 JSOW, GBU-39/B SDB and laser
JDAM, since Operation Allied Force and continues to
develop
new weapons as well as producing advanced variants of existing ones.